Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
The entire western liberal worldview is currently balanced on the ability to psychologically compartmentalize away from the mass atrocities in Gaza and what western governments are doing to perpetuate them.
Everything that mainstream liberals claim to oppose is on full display in Israel’s actions in Gaza. Racism. Fascism. Tyranny. Injustice. Genocide. Yet they must necessarily avoid throwing themselves into opposing these things there at all cost, because it would mean acknowledging that their own political allegiances are inseparably interwoven with them.
It would mean turning against Biden during an election year. It would mean admitting that their entire political posture against Trump all these years has been a phony performance, because they’re tacitly endorsing all the things they claimed to hate about him. It would mean admitting their entire worldview is a lie, and that all their critics to their left have been correct.
The western liberal is therefore in the year 2024 engaged in an exhausting regimen of nonstop mental gymnastics to avoid having an authentic relationship with the reality of what’s happening Gaza. They squirm this way and that, twisting their gaze toward empty nonsense like Barbie movie Oscar snubs and Trump’s latest instance of verbal diarrhea to avoid looking at what’s happening. On those odd occasions when they are forced to confront the reality of Gaza they start spouting gibberish about how “complicated” and “heartbreaking” it is and how they hope there can be peace as soon as possible, while frenetically avoiding saying precisely how that “peace” should be brought about.
Gaza exposes the mainstream western liberal ideology for the kayfabe performance it always has been. The job of the so-called liberal “moderate” has never been to oppose racism, fascism, tyranny, injustice or genocide, their job is to perpetually give the thumbs-up to one head of the two-headed monster that is the murderous western empire. Their job is to help put a positive spin on a globe-spanning power structure that is fueled by human blood. To help elect Bidens and Starmers and Trudeaus and Albaneses who will ensure that the gears of the empire keep on turning completely unhindered while paying lip service to human rights and social justice.
The one faint glimmer of brightness in this profoundly dark chapter in human history is that it might start opening some eyes to the fraudulence of the mainstream fake-left political faction that has been marketed to the western public as an alternative to far right depravity. That westerners might start awakening to the reality that everything they’ve been trained to believe about politics, their government and their world is a lie. Such an awakening would be the first step toward a mass-scale movement into health.
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Featured image via Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Everybody should know and understand what is NEOLIBERALISM. It has been destroying governments and democracy for the last half century and is a primary reason we are in this mess. Neoliberalism has the stated goal of denigrating the role of governments to where they are no longer sovereign, but in corporate capture.
Everyone should read Prof. Wendy Brown's book Dancing in the Ruins of Neoliberalism , which is just what we are doing. To understand neoliberalism is to understand what is happening today-corporate power on steroids
I've been getting lessons about my naivete. I feel such anguish over the genocide. That it's happening without anyone from the USA in the leadership fraternity similarly appalled and nigh on devastated by the naked slaughter of Palestinians astonishes and infuriates me. As hackneyed it is to say it all blows my mind as it squishes my heart. I cannot understand the silence of my two Washington senators - Cantwell and Murray. Not even their staff know why they are silent. It's like they both taken a sound and sight proof room to be in - so removed they are! Zombies. Without the least professional integrity to explaim/rationalize their silence to their constituents. How can your guts, your heart, your mind not be utterly repelled by the naked brutality, even sadism of the Israelis"? And to have your very own supposedly pinnacle representative of the peoples' voice and demands be in cahoots with this ethnic erasure and all it broadcasts - a pure gigantic blotting out of all the stuff engrained in us since kindergarten about the USA as a nation of justice, democracy, freedom. How can Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, McGurt not grok the gross dispicableness of such a huge crime against humanity? What IS the matter with them?